being kate

Alot of bread happens in my house.

For breakfast, a quick lunch, as cutlery, it all goes on some way or another.... I'm mean I'm married to a North African people!! Even the dried up old bits too hard for normal use get re-purposed as pudding or  dumplings or to pad our meatballs or veggie burgers.

I've recently got back into the rhythm of making my own bread again. It's a daily habit I seem to have let fall by the wayside since coming to Algeria, but with the price of almost everything rising beyond the realms of sensible it seemed like a timely enterprise.

On the whole I tend to avoid making Algerian bread.. it needs semolina and ALOT of elbow grease to create anything that even remotely resembles dough. Algerian breads are generally too labour intensive for me.... I enjoy them but being the realist that I am; with the family that I have I know it's not something I could find time to fit into my daily life on a regular basis.

Lately we've been eating these lovely little bread rolls... soft and barely baked with a whisper of flour still clinging to their tops... they're delicious mashallah.

here's what you'll need

• 2tbsp fast acting yeast
• 41/2 cups of flour
• 2tbsp oil
• 2tbsp sugar
• 2tsp salt
• 2 cups of warm water

if you have a bread machine, throw everything in the bread pan and set it on a dough cycle.

If you don't...

Put all the dry ingredients into a large bowl. Add the oil, and then the water bringing the flour to a soft dough.

This dough is incredibly soft and what you're looking for when kneading is a dough that's not sticky but very soft, light and flexible. Knead your dough for about 10-15 minutes if you have the stamina... I've got bored and kneaded for less.. and still got the same results. 

Leave it to rise until it doubles in size... this dough grows quickly for me, so I guess I leave it for about an hour tops. Then, take balls of dough ( I get about 12 ) and place them on a floured surface. Pat them out with your fingertips until you have little flattened discs of dough about 1/4 inch thick...I sprinkle a light dusting of flour on them and leave them to have a second rising.

This stage takes about half an hour for me, by which time they're almost triple the height that they were. 

They go into a pre-heated moderately hot oven 

But be prepared to wait it out with these babies, don't set a timer or walk away from the oven... they're done when the bottoms are slightly golden and the rolls sound hollow... they'll look beautifully pale on top with just the barest hint of going golden about them... what you want is a barely cooked look about them, pale and interesting is the way it goes.

Once you achieved that take them out and wrap them in a clean tea towel to cool down... this encourages the softness we're looking for... . they're perfect as burger buns, gorgeous toasted and make a nice sandwich bun. These have become my everyday bread.

If you have any leftover, freeze them or wrap in clingwrap or  freezer  bag them. they won't be AS good the next day but they're still passable.

These are my current obsession and as such I don't feel ready to customize them... but I can see sesame seeds, or olives or even onion or nigella seeds making their way in there at some point... 

Happy baking people, and if you can resist tearing one open and and eating it hot and dripping with butter fresh from the oven you are, without a doubt better women than  I